Packt Open Source has this week announced a series of discounts on its selection of best selling Open Source books. Readers will be offered exclusive discounts off the cover price of selected print books and eBooks for a limited period only.

So far in 2011, Packt Open Source announced in March that its donations to Open Source projects has surpassed the $300,000 mark, while in April insight into various projects was offered during the ‘Believe in Open Source’ campaign and July’s series of discounts continue this trend of Packt showing its commitment to the Open Source community.

The Packt Open Source books included in this exclusive discount offer include well known books such as JBoss AS 5 Performance Tuning, PHP jQuery Cookbook, Drupal 7 Module Development and Blender Lighting and Rendering, amongst others.

“This special discount showcases a host of Packt Open Source topics and allows readers to purchase some of our most well renowned books at an exclusive price” said Packt Open Source Marketing Executive Julian Copes. “

To ensure you do not miss this fantastic offer, visit the special discount page now, where you can view the extensive list of books included in the offer and access an array of related articles that were written by the authors.

The exclusive discounts are available from 4th July 2011. To find out more, please visit the Packt website.

Packt has this week announced a series of discounts and promotions to herald the publication of a new WordPress book; WordPress 3 Ultimate Security. Readers will be offered exclusive discounts, 20% and 30% off the cover price of all WordPress print books and eBooks for a limited period only.

WordPress is a semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. You can customize the features, incorporate your own design, and even write your own plug-ins with ease.

WordPress 3 Ultimate Security shows you how to hack your site before someone else does. You’ll uncover its weaknesses before sealing them off, securing your content and your day-to-day local-to-remote editorial process. This is more than some “10 Tips …” guide. It’s ultimate protection – because that’s what you need.

“WordPress is a topic that Packt is committed to publishing books on, and we are dedicated to providing interesting WordPress books that are both accessible and solution-based. Packt Open Source will continue to provide the WordPress community of users with practical books”, said Packt Open Source publisher Doug Paterson.

As you are aware – Microsoft Dynamics is one of the most popular technologies used in the market, and over the years Packthas been reputed as the leading publisher of Dynamics related books.To celebrate the recent publication of the Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 Reporting book, Packt is pleased to announce a series of attractive discounts on our wide range of Dynamics books:

There are a great range of open source tools out there for creating 2D and 3D graphics, to help you create stunning visuals for your website development or livening up your presentations. Here are some of the most widely used tools.

Blender is an amazing 3D modelling and animation tool that has seen a huge increase in adoption over the last few years. Blender has been used to create some stunning short movies such as Sintel, Elephants Dream and the hilarious Big Buck Bunny. Blender is also used to create many of the animations you see in advertising these days. See my quick overview of Blender.

The GIMP is a very powerful image manipulation tool that allows you to tweak any image file format out there and has a wide range of filters you can use to create some amazing effects. See my Gimp overview.

Scribus is a desktop publishing tool that can be used to make multi-page magazines or company brochures or any other documents that need professional layout tools. See my Scribus overview.

If you are interested in really getting into these tools, Packt currently has a series of discounts and promotions on its selection of Open Source Graphic Applications and Library books. The Open Source Graphic Applications and Libraries Month will offer readers exclusive discounts of 20% and 30% off the cover price of selected Graphic print books until 5th May 2011.

The Open Source Graphic Applications and Libraries Month discounts refer to books written on software used for graphic design, multimedia development, specialized image development, general image editing, or modeling.

“There are so many exciting Open Source projects for people who want to work with graphics, animation, or do some modeling. While some of them are easier to use than others, we’re committed to making it easy for anyone to use them, and unleash their creative potential. So far this year we’ve already published over 10 titles in this area, and we’ve got plenty more to come!” said Packt Open Source Publisher Doug Paterson.

To ensure you do not miss this fantastic offer, visit the special offer page now, where you can view the extensive list of books included in the offer and access an array of related articles that were written by authors.

This week there is the talk on ScalaZ by the London Scala user group and the Developer round table by the London Software Craftsmanship community.

Tonight (Monday 7th) I am running a games night to help people learn and explore kanban, lean and system thinking. I am joined by Karl Scotland who is another experienced practitioner with experience of delivering agile and kanban practices to many organisations. If you are new to kanban and the ideas behind it, then its a great opportunity to learn more in a practical way (no kanban experience required). Many teams are starting to adopt kanban, so its a good time to learn. If you have been using kanban for yourself or you team, then you can share your experience as you play the games and learn some ideas from others.The LJC are running a Getting Started session on OSGi by Simon Maple (IBM) and Zoe Slatery (IBM) soon and you may want to read the blog post Martijn wrote on OSGi as a warm up.

From Martijn Verbergblog post – As OSGi matures as a technology for application developers and with Jigsaw also coming into the mix around Java 8, now is a good time to learn about modularisation technologies in the Java space.

For those of you who want to practice your test driven development skills, there is a code retreat on 12th March down in Winchester. You will get a full day of TDD coding in a collaborative way and get to share ideas as a group. If anyone wants the LJC to run another code retreat in London then why not suggest it as a meetup event.

If you want to practice your Clojure skills and learn more about functional programming, the March Clojure dojo (29th) is almost full, so sign up soon.

Last week there was a major release of GlassFish Server 3.1. This release extends the Java EE 6 Reference Implementation with new application development capabilities, centralised administration and high availability features. Also including improved OSGi support for Java EE Applications, OSGi web console and Apache Felix 3.0.6 (Apache Gogo shell). Another good feature is that when applications are re-deployed, GlassFish maintains HTTP session and EJB state, enabling rapid iterative development. If you are new to Glassfish, also have a look at the community website.

There was a good sense of camaraderie and sharing of painful experiences as I discussed the frustration of working for a company with a Mafia-like culture. It seems that there are still a great number of companies out there that have problems looking at the way they work, with everyone too busy getting on with today’s work (problems) without knowing if its really benefiting the organisation. I had lots of questions in the pub afterwards and lots of feverish scribing during the talk, so I hope I imparted some useful survival tips and maybe the seeds of change.

JAX London Preview night was a little wobbly, due to the fact we were on a boat on a busy Thames river. I think the wavey nature of the boat added to the ambiance of the evening though. There were two great talks that evening, one on event driven architecture with Comet and the other on lots of new things in spring 3.1 (features just released that day). Everyone that braved the cold had a good evening and we were treated to drinks at the bar by the JAX London team (on Facebook now). I had all the vitamins and minerals I needed for the rest of that week from the Guinness that was bought for me. Thanks everyone.

I had my first book review published on Slashdot.org after a lot of trial and error. The book was on Inkscape, a really great example of open source software which can be used to create all sorts of graphic design work, from simple buttons and logos to complete web site designs. The Slashdot.org submission process is a bit fiddly and not quite so clearly documented as I’d like, so I wrote my own guide. Thanks to Packt Publishing for supplying the Inkscape book.

If you have write-ups of any events, please let the list know or send them directly to me.

Here are the books on offer this month. Packt have kindly offered the most recently published Java books in celebration of it being the last month of the year! The winner will be picked at random and announced at the end of the month:

Here are the books on offer this month. Packt have kindly offered the most recently published Java books in celebration of it being the last month of the year! The winner will be picked at random and announced at the end of the month:

Congratulations to the winners of our November draw – Mike Boskov and Konstantinos Papalias!

Good luck,

Barry Cranford

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What is the LJC

The London Java Community (LJC) is a group of Java Enthusiasts who are interested in benefiting from shared knowledge in the industry. Through our forum and regular meetings you can keep in touch with the latest industry developments, learn new Java (& other JVM) technologies, meet other developers, discuss technical/non technical issues and network further throughout the Java Community.